Available From UC Press

Laguna Lake, the largest lake in the Philippines, supplies Manila's dense urban region with fish and water while operating as a sink for its stormflows and wastes. Transforming the lake to deliver these multiple urban ecological functions, however, has generated resource conflicts and contradictions that unfold unevenly across space. 

In Urban Ecologies on the Edge, Kristian Karlo Saguin tracks the politics of resource flows and unpacks the narratives of Laguna Lake as Manila's resource frontier. Provisioning the city and keeping it safe from floods are both frontier-making processes that bring together contested socioecological imaginaries, practices, and relations. Combining fieldwork and historical accounts, Saguin demonstrates how people—powerful and marginalized—interact with the state and the environment to produce the unequal landscapes of urbanization at and beyond the city's edge. 

"The urban lives through its edges as well as its consolidations, and it sustains itself through uncertain and shifting interactions with water and a wide range of metabolisms. Few books have analyzed these processes so creatively and succinctly, with such incisive detailing of the adverse implications of extraction and enclosure to the intricate relationalities required for urban inhabitation." —AbdouMaliq Simone, author of Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South 

"An excellent analysis of the socioecological transformation of cities and a brilliant insight into the urbanization of Manila. Saguin vividly reveals how frontier urbanism transforms the city through its entanglements with water, fish, infrastructure, and landscape and impacts how life in Manila is variously sustained, threatened, and thrown into crisis. This thoughtful and rigorous book is a valuable contribution to how we understand urban change, metabolisms, and the trajectories of cities." —Colin McFarlane, author of Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds 

"Excellent scholarship. This is a thorough examination of metro Manila through an urban political ecology framework. Saguin brings a ton of research—empirical data and rich ethnographic fieldwork—to illustrate his argument. I learned a lot!" —Matthew T. Huber, author of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

"Solidly supported by rich empirical research and penetrative theoretical insight, Urban Ecologies on the Edge is a highly recommended, welcoming addition to the scholarship of both urban political ecology and Southeast Asian studies, shedding light on the complex web of socioecological struggles that bind together the urban and its resource frontier situated in the context of the Philippines." — Hyun Bang Shin, Professor of Geography and Urban Studies, The London School of Economics and Political Science